Information Sharing, Monitoring and Countermeasures Provisions in the Cybersec Bills

This chart compares on civil liberties grounds three bills that seek to promote cybersecurity and it updates a similar chart we issued on April 4, 2012 based on prior versions of all three bills.

The chart shows that Cybersecurity Act, S. 3414 (“Lieberman-Collins” bill) better protects privacy than do either of the competing bills, and that it should be further improved by dropping monitoring and countermeasures language.

The leading alternative Senate bill, SECURE IT, S. 3342, was re-introduced by Senator McCain and other co-sponsors on June 27 (“SECURE IT”). Despite a White House veto threat, the House passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, H.R. 3523 (“CISPA”) on April 26 on a vote of 248-168. It will be reconciled with cybersecurity legislation that the Senate passes. (Lieberman-Collins and SECURE IT include cybersecurity measures unrelated to information sharing that are not reflected in this chart.)